Random Notes on Nabokov’s “The Potato Elf” and Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson

 

 

 

 

I have just been reading Max Beerbohm’s classic Zuleika Dobson and take the liberty of borrowing a synopsis, with some glowing quotes  from E.M. Forster:

 

“Zuleika Dobson is a highly accomplished and superbly written book whose spirit is farcical," said E. M. Forster. "It is a great work--the most consistent achievement of fantasy in our time . . . so funny and charming, so iridescent yet so profound." Originally published in 1911, Max Beerbohm's sparklingly wicked satire concerns the unlikely events that occur when a femme fatale briefly enters the supremely privileged, all-male domain of Judas College, Oxford. A conjurer by profession, Zuleika Dobson can only love a man who is impervious to her considerable charms: a circumstance that proves fatal, as any number of love-smitten  suitors are driven to suicide by the damsel's rejection. Laced with memorable one-liners ("Death cancels all engagements," utters the first casualty) and inspired throughout by Beerbohm's rococo imagination, this lyrical evocation of Edwardian undergraduate life at Oxford has, according to Forster, "a beauty unattainable by serious literature."”

 

Elsewhere Forster describes it as “A highly accomplished and superbly written book…..the most consistent achievement of fantasy in our time…so funny and charming, so iridescent yet so profound.” Beerbohm’s only novel (he was best known as caricaturist, art critic, and essayist) has remained in print for nearly a century and was counted among the one hundred best  English novels of the XXth century--as were two VN novels.

 

So far as I know, VN never commented on Zuleika but it is not unreasonable to assume he was familiar with it. The novel was hugely popular with both Oxford and Cambridge students. Jan Morris refers to it several times in his/her book on Oxford. And Nabokov is known to have read other comic novels such as Norman Douglas’s South Wind (1917) and William Caine’s The Author of Trixie (1923), as well as older popular classics such as Jerome K. Jerome’s  Three Men in a Boat (1889), and Francis Burnand’s  About Buying a Horse (1875).

 

There is no real evidence to link VN and Beerbohm’s novel, but there are some tantalizing overlaps between Zuleika Dobson and Nabokov’s 1923 story, “The Potato Elf.” Most obvious and least important is the dwarf’s name “Dobson.” More striking is the show business connection. The captivating if shallow Zuleika is the daughter of a ne’er-do-well curate, son of the Warden of Oxford’s Judas College, who eloped with a circus rider. Zuleika continues her late mother’s show business career becoming a conjuror who performs in the great cities of Europe. Nabokov’s hero, Frederic Dobson, is also a circus performer who, inter alia, rides a white pony around the ring.  Nabokov assigns the role of conjuror not to Fred but to the latter’s stage partner, the magician, Shock, whose wife’s Nora seduces the dwarf. Virginal Fred is so overwhelmed by the experience that he quite wrongly assumes Nora loves him and sets up household in a remote village where he assumes she will join him. Years pass before Nora  visits and informs him he is the father of a son. (She departs, unable to bring herself to tell the ecstatic Fred that the boy is dead.)  Stunned, Fred belatedly runs after her and succumbs to a fatal heart attack.  Zuleika, on the other hand, causes the suicide drowning of nearly all Judas College’s love-smitten undergraduates, following the example of the glittering Duke of Dorset, the trendsetting college dandy. One of the few survivors is the Duke’s humble housemate Noaks who is referred to in passing as “a dwarf,” although he is merely of short stature.

 

The possible echoes of Beerbohm’s novel in “The Potato Elf” are far too faint to claim any consequential “influence” other than perhaps to suggest VN’s awareness of Beerbohm’s classic caper. The reader would be on firmer ground in remarking the shared crystalline rococo style of the two authors, although Beerbohm was at his peak while Nabokov was still a relative tyro. Beerbohm  launched his career as a part of the Wildean circle that surrounded the famous “Yellow Book” magazine.

 

 

As far as theme, Nabokov’s tale owes a more obvious debt to Walter De la Mare’s 1921 “Memoirs of a Midget” in which a dwarf dies as a result of falling of his horse while substituting for his lover (the midget of the title) in the circus ring. I have examined Nabokov’s ties to both De la Mare and poet Rupert Brooke elsewhere. Perhaps Max Beerbohm’s “Zuleika” should be added to the list of Nabokov’s English literary forebears.      

 

 

 

 

D. Barton Johnson